Some Comments on Shakespeare’s Pericles Prince of Tyre
June 21, 2023
Peter Shea
I recently took part in a cold reading of Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a play it is fun to make fun of. Fortunately for my soul, I happened on two nice, sort-of respectful treatments of Pericles, Marjorie Garber’s Harvard lecture on Youtube and Ada Palmer’s fine post on Pericles and Love’s Labours Lost on Tor.com. This research put me in a bind, as research often does. I realized I was not up to the level of these commentators, but I still wanted to SAY some things. I decided to take the passive-aggressive cop-out of asking a few tiny questions.
1.Why does somebody famous co-author something? More generally, why does somebody famous want to dilute or hide involvement in a work (with pseudonyms, for example)? We know some of the general answers. If one is famous for being an expert and serious, as Paul Linebarger was, one wants to hide one’s forays into pulpy space opera, so one invents “Cordwainer Smith”. If one is getting old and wants to keep making money, one finds a competent deputy and co-authors big books one doesn’t have the energy to take on alone. (I imagine that is Tom Clancy’s story.) There’s one other possible reason, much more interesting: if one is famous for doing something well, and one has done that thing well for a good long time, one may, late in life, wonder whether the habits and disciplines that made one successful also blocked one from certain discoveries and accomplishments. And then one might say, “I don’t want to lose my reputation of being good at doing normal stuff, but I want to break a bunch of the rules that have contributed to my success. So, I’ll dilute my writing by co-writing. I’ll find somebody to give me mediocrity cover: if the thing turns out badly, I can blame it on a failed collaboration.” I have no historical reason to think that’s what Shakespeare was up to, but I think that’s what Shakespeare was up to, anyway.
2.The basic structure of this play I would describe as a “fractured fairy tale” or maybe, a defeated fairy tale. The standard fairy tale is: the wonderful princess can only be won by solving the riddle or going on the quest or something, and so the rest of the story is: solving, or quest. Here, Pericles solves the riddle instantly, and sees that the princess isn’t all that wonderful, and that having anything at all to do with these people is likely to get him killed. It’s like: his fairy tale is destroyed by lightning. His life as a fairy tale hero is over. And the rest of the play is just to say: that’s all right. That’s actually better than all right. It’s like he’s acting out Emerson’s Give All To Love, which ends: heartily know/ when half-gods go/ the gods arrive. (He is also acting out Norstrilia and maybe The Three Penny Opera.)
3.Pericles, Prince of Tyre is the descendent of the Odyssey. In writing both the Illiad and the Odyssey, Homer made spaces for two kinds of thing, and this is one of them.
4.As someone who has stayed home perhaps too long, during this covid pause, I am inclined to think of the play as conveying this bit of advice: if you stay home, you will at best realize your dream. If you travel, you will encounter evil beyond your wildest imagining and hope also beyond your wildest imagining.
5.When I read the dialogue of the fishermen, I am reminded of moving day for my friend Nancy, who worked with geologists – an ex-marine and a Russian immigrant. As we moved things, the marine kept goosing the Russian, “This is just like when you guys dismantled all those German factories and carted them back to mother Russia.” It’s social consciousness like Brecht, but without quite the revolutionary edge (though I can imagine it was still dangerous to write): these folks are willing to be oppressed, as long as they get to say they’re oppressed, like every five minutes. That’s both funny and realistic – people who are being messed with fall into that, when circumstances are not favorable for revolution. I think this might be one of those fairly radical writing experiments one can do when one has the option of disavowing the finished product.
6.The scenes in the brothel are also interesting as ground-breaking: how would a pure soul, a deeply good person, handle being sold into sex-work. Does such a person have any moves? (This is a sub-question of the question, “Can one actually non-violently resist evil and not end up a martyr?”) On one level, this is funny – the new sex worker produces a kind of virtue-mill. But it is also one very difficult improv/writing exercise: how do you quickly transform a horny guy into someone who’s done with rutting, who longs to hear the vestal virgins sing? Again, it’s not the sort of exercise one wants to take on in a play that will be part of one’s official canon – because one is too likely to fail.
7.For those who have fun making fun of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, the character of Antiochus has a target on his back: he pretty much announces that he is committing incest, then invites people to say back to him what he said, so he can kill them. This seems like a character only a playwright off his game could write, EXCEPT that we in the U.S. have been living with that as a daily performance for too many years now. Whether such people should exist, or can be explained, they DO exist, and it is nice of Shakespeare to acknowledge that.
8.(For this point, I owe debts to Marjorie Garber and her students) There’s a lot of structure in Pericles, for a mess of play. It is a sandwich of two riddles, one in which someone reveals that he has destroyed the very idea of daughterhood, and one in which a daughter gradually awakens confidence in her father that she is his daughter and he is her father and that is very good. This all happens just before the marriages that ensure the stability of two kingdoms. (Confucius would be enormously pleased: in his sense, names have been rectified, all around, and therefore the kingdoms are secure.) Also, the Miranda-reveal scene reminds us of the last scenes with Lear and Cordelia: there is no reason why rescue has to come too late. Sometimes, everything does turn out all right – better than one could have possibly hoped, if one just – goes outside of one’s spoiled fairy tale (or one’s constraining dramatic conventions that ensure success) and begins knocking on random doors. (I’m reminded of Jesus’ admonition: even if the judge is a creep, keep knocking on his door.) I am tempted to summarize Pericles, “You just never know.”
9.One of Ada Palmer’s comments seems worth answering: “As a friend said when we watched it together: “Pericles has too many things. None of them matter.” While harsh, that is the feeling I tend to have while watching Pericles: detachment from the importance of any given event.” When I read this, I am reminded of the Taoist story about the man whose horses run away. The neighbors say, “Poor guy.” He says, “Maybe.” Then they come back, with a lot of wild horses. The neighbors say, “Lucky guy.” He says, “Maybe.” His son tries to ride one of the wild horses, and breaks his leg. The neighbors say, “Poor guy.” He says, “Maybe.” The emperors press gang comes to collect people for military service. The son is laid up and can’t go. I am also reminded of Lillian Hellman’s account of a disturbed friend whom she split from when he pretended to rob a store. She said, “You are a man of unnecessary things.” Some people are not very well anchored in the script of success and failure, for all kinds of reasons, some of them quite important. This is a play that not only ignores the rules, but tries to get us to not care about them so much, maybe so we will look a little beyond them. There’s a wonderful scifi story, "Happy Ending" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, that begins: “This is the end of the story.” It tells a perfect suburban fairy tale ending: the hero inherits millions of dollars, marries the love of his life, and lives happily ever after. This is followed by two other sections, headed “This is the middle of the story” and “This is the beginning of the story.” When one finishes reading, one feels the ending as deeply tragic. I think something in this direction is going on here. I don’t like it. It feels unsatisfactory to me in just the way Ada Palmer’s friend said. But still, I think something is going on that makes use of the experience of a lifetime of writing plays to do something that bursts the box.
10.There’s a lot of Palmer’s Terra Ignota in this play: both seem to me homages to the Odyssey and, beyond that, to the idea behind the Odyssey that maybe the next island will have what we want, or need, or anyway something wonderful. Both try to picture an absolutely good being walking through a messy world. Both love to say to the reader, “You think that was strange; watch what I do in the next chapter.” Both like to blow up people’s normal notions of what a happy ending is, saying “You think that’s happy; I’ll show you HAPPY.” (And also, what a really awful predicament looks like, “You think that’s misery; I’ll show you MISERY.” (Imagine that Pericles had somehow talked his way into marrying Antiochus’ daughter: I can’t think of a more hellish hell.))
